Star Wars The Force Awakens "Review" [SPOILERS!]

This post (obviously) contains SPOILERS for The Force Awakens: Don’t read it if you haven’t watched the movie yet.

Watched it? Good. First things first, the movie is decent. I got into the theater thinking that it would be a pretty terrible movie and I came out thinking that it’s mediocre, so thumbs up (sorta).

The good points:

• The characters and actors are really good. They play well together and the acting is top notch.
• It’s 100% designed from the ground up to have the feel of a classic Star Wars movie.

The subjective point [I personally liked the prequels, but for the people who didn’t like them this can be added to ‘the good points’]:

• It’s 100% designed not to be like the prequels.

The bad points:

• It has no soul. The movie doesn’t try anything new. I liked the prequels because they’re not an exact copy of the first trilogy, this movie is a perfect copy of episode 4 (+ a tiny bit of episode 5 and 6). If I’d want to watch Ep. 4 I’d go and watch that instead ;) It would have been perfectly fine if it has 2/3 references to episode 4, but not this many and this obvious. And not as key foundations of the movie. This is my main complaint and the main reason why for me The Force Awakens is the worst Star Wars movie so far.

Annoying copies (in no particular order):

• Droid gets an important message to deliver to the rebellion.
• Droid wanders around on a desert planet.
• “Death Star” destroys one (/ multiple) planet(/s).
• “Death Star” targets the rebel base.
• Rebels need to destroy the “Death Star” before it fires. How? They need to deactivate a shield generator and use their X/Y-wings torpedos to blow it up.
• Han and Chewy surrender to an imperial platoon in the same exact way as Ep. 6.
• When avoiding the Tie Fighters on Jakku, the tunnel (the inside of a broken Star Destroyer) is almost the same as the tunnel in the Death Star in Ep.6 + The way they exit such tunnel in The Force Awakens is basically the same as the way the Millennium Falcon exits the Death Star just before it blows up in Ep. 6.
• A sith, wearing a black mask interrogates a rebel prisoner about the location of the droid with the plans (/ map).
• A sith, wearing a black mask interrogates a rebel prisoner about the location of the secret rebel base.
• The planet of the rebel base looks the same as the Yavin moon, hell even the base looks the same. This is not as bad as the others since it’s likely that different rebel bases may look similar and it’s not rare to find a planet with a lot of trees in the Star Wars universe, but still, they could have done something different easily.
• Kylo Ren tells the officer on the Star Destroyer not to disappoint him, the same as Darth Vader (as before since Kylo Ren aspires to be like Vader this is not as bad as the previous ones, but pretty annoying nonetheless).
• The Millenium Falcon gets trapped by a tractor beam and pulled inside. The crew than smuggle themselves to avoid being detected. (Technically it’s not a compartment for smuggling in Ep.7, but it is basically the same thing.)
• Imperial Commander (/Moff) feeling more powerful than the Sith that commands him (and showing it explicitly, as with Darth Vader in Ep. 5).
• One of the main characters dying at the hands of someone close to him (Ben / Han).

Not to talk about the plot inconsistencies:

• Rey just touches a lightsaber for the first time and she’s a master at it (she used a stick before, but that’s nothing like a lightsaber. It would have been fine if it was a double-bladed lightsaber, but it’s not). I would understand if we were talking about The Force since it’s obvious that she’s way better than Kylo Ren at that.
• Captain Phasma says that her Stormtroopers will be there in minutes to turn the shield back on. The room remains open and not guarded for 20+ mins and nothing happens.

PS. I understand that a lot of people loved the movie and that’s great. I just feel it could be so much better if they didn’t try to just satisfy the fans at all cost - even going as far as sacrificing the plot for that.

You can let me know your opinion about the movie on Twitter.